TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia – please stop offering holidays in illegal Israeli settlements

Trips abroad are supposed to be fun, not part of a wider system of human rights abuse

Much of the country has had a blast of cold weather and a sprinkling of snow in recent weeks, but never fear – the summer’s not far away.

Last week there was news that UK holiday bookings in the New Year period are up on this time last year. So-called “personal travel agents” are doing well, but then so is tourism in general.

In fact it’s booming. The apparently simple business of catering for people who want to temporarily leave their own homes for a spot of recreation is one of the world’s biggest industries. It generates trillions in revenue and online travel companies – notably TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb – are all thriving. TripAdvisor claims its website is the world’s most popular holiday booking site (accessed more than 15 million times every single day), while the parent company of Booking.com is valued at more than $100bn.

But dark clouds are threatening this apparently sunny scene.

In November, Airbnb announced it would stop offering around 200 listings on its site for holiday properties in Israeli settlements located in the Palestinian West Bank. The US company said it had taken the decision after spending a “considerable time speaking to various experts” and in light of the settlements being “at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians”.

Airbnb’s decision was the right one but we need to unpick this a little.

Israel’s enormous illegal settlement project has been at the heart of its 51-year military occupation of the West Bank. It’s a lot more than the incidental cause of a “dispute”. The settlements are the source of half a century of systematic injustice, discrimination and other human rights violations perpetrated by the state of Israel and settlers against the Palestinian people. They are also illegal under international law and a war crime.

A reminder of the figures: more than 50,000 Palestinian homes and structures have been demolished, with land – fields, orchards, entire livelihoods – simply taken from tens of thousands of Palestinians. In their place, more than 600,000 Israeli settlers have been allowed to move into often purpose-built – and totally illegal – settlements. These are fortified enclaves – approximately 250 in number – encroaching on some 1,000 square kilometres of Palestinian land. Many of the settlements are serviced by settler-only roads and guarded by a network of Israeli military checkpoints and other security infrastructure.

So, given that companies have a responsibility to avoid complicity in human rights violations, holiday firms should not be profiting from – and indeed helping to sustain – the settlements. In announcing that it would be removing itself from settlements in the West Bank, Airbnb was belatedly doing the right thing.

However, as with any holiday booking – always read the small print. Airbnb’s heavily-publicised pull-out from the settlement tourism business hasn’t, as yet, actually taken place. And meanwhile Airbnb continues to offer 100 properties in occupied East Jerusalem, where some 200,000 Israeli settlers now live in settlements, including homes forcibly taken from Palestinians.

What’s more, the three other major online travel companies are still busily promoting settlement accommodation and “attractions”. Booking.com currently lists 45 hotels and rentals, including in East Jerusalem; Expedia.com (and its Hotels.com site) offers nine accommodation providers, including four large hotels; and TripAdvisor lists more than 70 different attractions, tours, restaurants, cafés, hotels and rental apartments in settlements.

Holidays are supposed to be fun, not part of a wider system of human rights abuse. The settlements breach the Geneva Conventions (an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”: article 49, fourth Geneva Convention). The establishment and maintenance of settlements are also war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In addition, many of the violations inherent in Israel’s creation and expansion of the settlements – such as wanton destruction and confiscation of property, and forcible transfer of local populations – also constitute war crimes.

The message, in other words, is as crystal-clear as some of those Mediterranean summer skies. The travel sector needs to take its responsibility to avoid complicity in human rights violations seriously. It needs to check out of the Israeli settlement holiday business, and to do so fast.

For the avoidance of doubt, to call for this isn’t about a wider boycott of Israel or Israeli businesses. That is not what Amnesty, with our settlement goods campaign is doing. We are simply calling for all businesses – including ones in the UK – to stop profiting from and sustaining these illegal settlements. And the UK government should move to ban this trade as soon as possible.

Holiday companies know all too well that in the depths of a freezing January people are desperate to beat the winter blues. But that mustn’t mean travel companies promoting holidays that profit from other people’s misery.

Kate Allen is the director of Amnesty International UK